1. Thrown, her book-length essay, is an account of three years spent in the company of mixed martial artists. It is narrated from the perspective of an excitable, semi-fictionalized graduate student named Kit.

2. Howley teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.

3. Jennifer Latson of the Boston Globe has called Thrown “a fresh, funny, and highly cerebral treatise on the philosophical merits of cage fighting, which challenges not only the stigma surrounding the sport but the conventions of literary nonfiction itself.”

4. Thrown is a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of 2014, an NPR best book of 2014, a Slate Book Review best book of 2014, and Time magazine’s #2 best book of nonfiction for 2014.

5. You can explore her website here to read more of her work before she comes to campus on March 17 and 18.